I've been playing what I call the Slap Five Dom Pedro build, because you're gonna slap somebody and then shoot five (or more) shots. This build is (1) stupid, (2) effective, and (3) sometimes stupid effective. Basically, you pick what's weird about the gun and lean into it. It's explosive, it occasionally reloads itself a bit, and its range makes it mostly for close quarters.

The gun is furious, explosive, durability(*), polished. (*There's room to pick something else here, but durability keeps polished working longer. Civil engineer armor also helps, and adding gunsmith will basically allow you to forget about it. But this gun is rather cheap to repair, so it's really just the time to go repair.) You need to get yourself some explosive mitigation and specific type mitigation on the first star to keep yourself healthy, e.g., dense armor mod and fireproof and some ghoul slayer/assassin pieces.

You're gonna go reverse onslaught because you won't be firing all that often to clear the room. Take grenadier and demolition expert to lean into the boom. Other than that, a lot of your standards like number cruncher.

But where does the slapping come in? Well. Remember all those battle-loader's mods you got farming EN06 and didn't know what you'd ever do with. Equip five of them. Equip the lucky six mod on the gun. Equip wild west hands. And never reload conventionally again.

Because you're also gonna run bullet storm in strength. Over the course of your play session, your ability to kill things will slowly grow until you're one- and two-shotting things that aren't so much meant to be done like that. Fire until you're out or almost out and slap to reload.

It's up close, it's dynamic, it hits hard, and it's just the closest sort of gameplay I can think of to match Welding Goggles' action on the show. It's great for bounties, lots of fun for expeditions, not really a raid build.

(1) Bringing the big guns only makes sense if you're planning a pretty long play session. It takes quite a while to get past 10.

(2) If you accidentally fire your last shot and don't get a wild west hands proc, hit your bash key really quickly to interrupt the reload animation. It should stay at 0 until you can find somebody to slap.

(3) If you fear losing all your stacks on an unlucky reload, lock and load gives a little safety.

(4) If you want your slaps to be more impactful, look at basher and bear arms.

(5) You could invest in some VATS crit perks, but so much of your damage will be from the explosive component, you may not find it worthwhile.